


with a hammer and nails and a fear of failure

by sagemb



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, Spider-Man (Tom Holland Movies)
Genre: Canon Compliant, College Student Peter Parker, Gen, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, being a college freshman is harder than being an avenger, the mortifying ordeal of being a public figure, the passage of time, up through endgame and far from home
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-20
Updated: 2019-09-20
Packaged: 2020-11-02 09:54:56
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,108
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20706137
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sagemb/pseuds/sagemb
Summary: When Peter sets foot on MIT campus, he's a year late and everybody already knows who he is.





	with a hammer and nails and a fear of failure

**Author's Note:**

> Title from the song Here and Heaven.
> 
> A warning for minor self-harm (there's one sentence about it and it isn't graphic).

When Peter sets foot on MIT campus, he's a year late and everybody already knows who he is.

He can feel the stares on him when he hops out of the driver's seat of May's Volvo in front of New House. He can feel them when he cheerily shrugs off the volunteer move-in team's offers of help and the accompanying awed expressions when they realize who he is, when he grabs both of his crap-filled storage tubs from the trunk and hauls them up to the third floor, and when he walks down the hall filled with the chaos of other freshmen moving in and they look up at him and freeze and their voices turn to whispers.

By the time he finds room number 3184, he's shaking, and it has nothing to do with the weight in his hands. _ PETER BENJAMIN PARKER, Class of 2030, _ a little placard taped to the door reads. Below that: _ SAMUEL XUN HUANG, Class of 2030. _

There's someone in the room already. Three someones, actually: a tall, skinny Asian kid and his parents.

"Hey!" says Sam Huang, Peter's roommate, whom he’s been texting for most of the summer. "You’re here! Nice to finally meet you, man."

"Nice to meet you too," Peter says, smiling. "It's good to be here."

It isn't until after he and May have brought up the rest of his stuff and he's fitted his sheets onto the bed that he gets a chance to check his phone.

10:36 AM

Ned: _ hows move in day going _

Ned: _ bruh i remember last year i didn't realize until my parents left that i'd forgotten to pack my contact lenses. i was blind for days. fattest L _

Ned: _ hope you haven't forgotten anything important _

_ it's going good, _ Peter types. _ tiring tho. _

Ned: _ nice. is your roommate chill _

_ so far but i haven't really had time to talk to him in person, _ Peter responds. _ still unpacking _

Ned: _ oh yeah good luck have fun. see you in eight days _

Peter puts his phone back in his pocket.

An hour later, he's nearly done setting up his side of the room. All of his clothes are in the dresser and closet, he’s shoved a ton of junk under his bed, and his nanosuit tank is tucked into the corner. Karen is a clock radio on his desk.

"I don't need hand soap," he tells May. "There's a soap dispenser in the bathroom already."

May looks up from where she's fussing with his toiletries—half of which she'd packed for him because she insists that he underpacks and that it's better to have lots of little frivolous things and redundancies than to go without and be miserable—and frowns. "Honey, you don't wanna use that stuff. It'll dry out your hands, and you don't want chapped hands in a Boston winter."

"I have moisturizer. I'll be fine."

"Just keep it, Peter. Shove in a drawer. When you need it, you'll thank me."

"Okay," Peter says softly, and takes the soap from her.

* * *

Later, when he’s sitting alone in the room, he pinches the skin between his thumb and index finger, which is dry pretty much year-round, so hard that he nearly makes himself bleed.

* * *

Orientation Week is a lot of smiling and asking new faces the same questions over and over: _ What’s your name? Where are you from? Which house do you live in? _

A lot of kids ask Peter what his name is and then laugh like they’ve said the most hilarious thing ever. Logically, Peter doesn’t blame them, because he knows that if he were in their shoes and face-to-face with the youngest member of the Avengers Initiative, he wouldn’t know how to not make it weird either. But it doesn’t exactly make him want to be friends with them either.

_ How did you spend your summer? _

Everyone knows the answer to this, too. He’d talked about it at an Avengers press conference last year shortly after high school graduation.

_ I’ll be taking a gap year before starting my freshman year at MIT, _ he’d said in front of a sea of reporters and cameras in the Avengers Facility atrium. _ I’m going to be spending that time helping the earthside Avengers Initiative rebuild its ranks, training with our restructured combat teams, and responding to global security threats if needed. Not a lot of seventeen-year-olds get to work a summer job as cool as mine, _he’d quipped, and laughter rippled through the room.

He is newly nineteen now. He’s packed on thirteen pounds of muscle in the past year, healed from a broken ankle and a dislocated shoulder and a GSW to the thigh and another building collapsing on him, and Jesus fucking Christ does he feel like a kid in a world too big for him.

* * *

A week before high school graduation, MJ, happy and fearless and Harvard-bound, had said, “You can’t protect the world and have functional interpersonal relationships at the same time, can you?”

“I’m sorry,” Peter had said for the thousandth time, because there are so many things that he can’t fix, no matter how much he wishes he could.

They’ve been on a break since then.

* * *

“Hey kid,” says a hologram of Rhodey. “Nice room decor. How’s it going so far?”

“Pretty good,” Peter says. “Physics is totally kicking my ass, but at the same time, I’m kicking its ass too.”

“Not bad. You getting enough sleep?”

“Dude, I’m so tired by the end of the day that I just crash. Seven solid hours a night. Like a baby. And like, if I weren’t so tired, I’d totally be having stress dreams, but I’m not.”

“Okay,” says Rhodey. “I mean, I know what the hellish wonders of MIT are like, so it’s not like I have a place to judge what you just said.”

“What wonders?” Peter asks, groaning, and Rhodey laughs. “No, I mean seriously, it’s amazing. Everyone’s so smart in their own way and it’s crazy having to keep up with it all. And I don’t even hate the food, since I’ve been eating May’s cooking for years.”

“You’ll start missing her food soon,” Rhodey tells him. “Happens to everyone.”

“Eh, not yet. How’re things at the compound?”

“Quiet, now that you’re finally gone.”

“Thanks.”

“Too quiet, maybe. Everyone’s gone so often. You know how it is.” Rhodey looks pensive, tired. “The UN’s been on my ass about EDITH again.”

“Why? They wanna call a drone strike on a field of magical Asgardian cows again?”

“Mainly they think it’s crazy that Tony Stark launched a satellite armed with thousands of drones and used it to spy on everyone on Earth who owns a cell phone,” says Rhodey. “Which it is, and it’s also crazy that he did all that through his knockoff Google Glass, and then gave those glasses to a minor who wasn’t even Accords-sanctioned at the time, and now that you’re no longer on active duty, they want you to turn over ownership of EDITH to someone they’ve handpicked.” Rhodey sighs. “God knows I’ll always love Tony, but hell if the legacy he left behind isn’t a pain in my ass at the best of times.”

There’s an engineering lab on campus named for him. Most buildings on campus are powered by arc reactor technology. Every year, so they say, some kid tries to build their own version of the Iron Man suit. At least ten people in Peter’s hall have Iron Man posters hanging in their room.

“Believe me, I know,” says Peter.

* * *

A hairstylist who'd done his hair for a magazine photoshoot had taught him how to shape his hair with product so that it emphasized his jawline, made his face more angular; older.

He has a little jar of pomade among his toiletries, which he'd purchased with more money than what a new pair of sneakers used to cost him. Now, he dips the pads of his fingers into the jar and scoops out a glob of product, finger-combing it through his hair. He slicks back the sides and fluffs up the top. He does this every morning.

* * *

“Dude, I told you to drop International Relations if you got Janssen,” Ned says over a sandwich from Forbes. “Like, it doesn’t even matter if you’re actually into it or not. It’s just hell.”

“I know,” Peter says mournfully. Not even his delicious hot chocolate is enough to make him feel less dead. “I thought I’d be able to finesse it. I’m just… so tired.”

“Bet you wish you’d stayed an Avenger now,” replies Ned.

“I mean,” says Peter. “Well, no. But also it’d be easier. A lot of sitting around doing nothing and then several hours of acute stress when everything’s just coming at you all at once.”

“You just described my procrastination habits,” Ned says.

“I’ve managed to keep on top of everything through sheer force of will,” Peter says. “But I feel like if I let go of an ounce of control, I’ll just fall apart.”

“Oh yeah,” says Ned. “Freshman year’s like that. But then you stop caring so much. Now I’m like, constantly asleep except for when I’m actually supposed to be sleeping. Also you gotta get good at doing the bare minimum, or else—dude. Dude. If you put in a hundred percent on everything, you will die. I’m serious.”

“I believe you,” Peter says, as something like dismay trickles into his gut.

It isn’t that Peter’s resentful of Ned. Like, actually. He’s Peter’s best friend and he always has been. He’s never made Peter feel like a freak for any reason, despite the fact that Peter had frequently felt like a freak around other people for absolutely _no_ reason even before being bitten by a radioactive spider. And somehow Ned has the ability to make talking out loud take less energy for Peter than being quiet. This, being contrary to Peter’s understanding of himself, is one of the things he likes the most about Ned.

But it used to be different. Ned was never vapid or stupid, but he was always simply a little bit _young_ even though he’s seven months older than Peter. The experiences of grief inherent to Peter’s life are for the most part still abstract to Ned, and of course Ned knows nothing about the most vital, classified events of Peter’s past year. And now he’s a full year ahead of Peter in college and he knows all the ropes that Peter’s still trying to figure out. There’s something that feels inherently wrong about the whole situation. Notwithstanding the guilt that wracks him for thinking thoughts like this.

“Okay,” says Ned, cramming the last of his sandwich into his mouth. “I gotta get to algo. See you, man. Good luck.”

“See you,” Peter echoes, and watches Ned hurry out the door.

* * *

A girl asks him for a selfie as he’s walking to his lab session. He says yes, because it’s not like he can say no, and then as he’s about to head into the building, she asks him, “Were you the one who called campus security on the hockey party last Saturday?”

Peter freezes. “Uh,” he says. “I didn’t even know about that. So no, that wasn’t me.”

He really didn’t know. He barely ever leaves his room unless it’s to eat in the dining hall or go to class; how could he?

“Oh, okay,” she says, frowning.

“I… gotta head to class,” he says. “Nice meeting you?”

She raises her eyebrows and then breaks into a wide, excited grin. “Nice meeting you too, Peter.”

* * *

Later, Peter sits in his bed and reminds himself of all the reasons why he decided to come here.

He’s going to be an Avenger for the rest of his foreseeable future. No matter what else he does with his life, whether he fixes cars or keeps a garden in his free time, or starts a family, or consults for Stark Industries, he’s got his career mapped out for him. Or—not his career. His role. His purpose. _ When you can do the things that I can, but you don’t, and then the bad things happen, they happen because of you. _

It is a charge he is given to take. He doesn’t think he could live without it. But also he remembers being fourteen and dumpster diving out of the sheer desperate desire to build, and he remembers the faraway, wonder-filled look on Tony’s face when he would talk about MIT, about the professors who changed him. About the lifelong best friend that he’d met. What’s more, Peter wants to work with Bruce, Rhodey, and Helen in R&D as much as he wants to be on the ground, which is far more than he wants to be in the command center giving orders. He came of age as an Avenger. He’s got the rest of his entire life to be one, too. There’s time in between to be something else: to live in the world of non-powered people for a while and know a sort of domestic, everyday concerns; to let those concerns become his for a while.

See, when it had all happened, when Beck had outed his identity as Spider-Man to the public, he’d spent months alternately in safehouses provided by Pepper Potts and in front of Senate and UN committees trying to clear his name, and in that hellish, interminable time he wanted nothing more than to live in his cramped bedroom in Queens and go to school, where no one thought he was anything more than a flakey, messed-up loser, and analyze John Donne or some mind-numbingly boring shit like that. He thought he’d never get to be normal again.

Now, he thinks maybe he was right about that.

_ You chose this, _ Peter tells himself. _ If it’s a problem, then solve it. _

He gets the feeling that he’ll be telling himself this a lot over the next four years.

* * *

Another week of classes goes by. He gets an A minus on a physics quiz, falls asleep in the middle of his International Relations reading, jerks off apathetically in the shower, experiences the hell that is sauteed kale from the dining hall, visits the counseling center, and meets up with Ned again.

“I’m thinking of getting a buzzcut,” says Ned. “Easy maintenance.”

Peter considers this. “Hell yeah. Why not?”

“My mom might get mad, first of all.”

“Oh, shit, right.”

“Also, I don’t wanna look like an Asian skinhead.”

Peter frowns. “I don’t think that’s a thing.”

* * *

1:04 AM

MJ: _ i hear you finally made it to the ‘tute _

* * *

"Someone smoked weed in the stairwell and then tried to cover it up with body spray," Sam says. "Fucking fumes, man. Just do it out your window. Jeez."

Peter snorts. Sam is from small town Virginia, and sometimes Peter honestly wonders if the Internet was the only window Sam had into normal life before he got here. "Dude, kids would hotbox the elevator in my apartment building, like, every other day."

"Wack," Sam says. "At my school, there was one stoner kid per grade and that was enough for us."

"But like, there's a difference between a _ stoner _ stoner and someone who smokes weed sometimes. You know? So like, more than one kid smoked weed, right?" Peter asks desperately.

Sam shrugs. "Well, people vaped for sure. So dab pens were probably a thing."

"Oh thank God," says Peter. "I was so worried that you lived in an alternate universe where kids didn't get addicted to nicotine for no reason."

"Aren't you supposed to be, like, the morally pure Avenger?"

"I'm a New Yorker above all else," Peter says firmly.

“You know, you’re so much more normal than I thought you’d be,” says Sam. “Like, when I found out that my roommate was gonna be Peter Parker, AKA Spider-Man, AKA a literal Avenger, I thought you were gonna have a stick up your ass and never do anything except study and work out and make important phone calls. I thought you'd be some kind of narc or something. Or you'd go the total opposite direction and just get bitch-ass shitfaced every weekend and, like, snort coke and not give a fuck about anything, because you're finally free from being a voluntary child soldier. But like, you’re not totally an asshole.”

“Thank you,” says Peter. He could not have asked for a chiller roommate than Sam, and for that, he is grateful.

* * *

There’s a girl in his bio class who makes him think of Liz Allan. They look nothing alike, and Peter definitely isn’t infatuated with her, but she’s very capable and very kind in a simple, honest way that reminds him of how Liz used to look at him.

“You should join Spinning Arts,” she tells him once as they walk out of class together. Her name is Kelsie and she wears very large, dangly earrings. “I feel like you’d be good at it.”

“Don’t they juggle fire?” he asks.

Kelsie grins. “Yeah, it’s super fun.”

“Huh,” he says. “Okay. I guess that sounds cool.”

“Dope. There’s a Spinjam this Friday. Come and learn how to juggle bowling pins and stuff.”

She nods at him, then ducks down a side street and disappears.

* * *

When Peter gets back to his dorm, it’s three in the afternoon. He hops in the shower and washes out all the pomade from his hair. After he steps out, he wraps a towel around his torso and stands in front of his closet mirror, staring at himself.

He combs out his hair, leaving it in loose, floppy waves. It takes him several minutes of rifling through his dresser to figure out what he wants to wear, but finally he puts on a pair of jeans, a worn science pun T-shirt, and a flannel. He looks in the mirror again. He could be fifteen again, except of course he isn’t: he looks tireder and broader. He learned how to hold himself differently in media training.

It’s a half-hour walk to get to where he wants to be going, but for him it takes only fifteen. When he gets there, his hands are clammy and his heart is beating hard inside his chest.

Once inside Clover Food Lab, Peter instantly spots MJ sitting in a booth near the back. She waves at him.

“Hi,” he says, when he reaches her. “It’s, uh, good to see you again.”

“You too,” she says, smiling slightly. “You’ve been busy saving the world, huh?”

He laughs. “Not recently. I’m being eaten alive by problem sets. It’s so exhausting.”

“Suck it up, loser,” says MJ. “Welcome to college.”

**Author's Note:**

> I am not a student at MIT, so I apologize for any inaccuracies.
> 
> I took all my anxieties about being a first semester college freshman, multiplied them by a thousand, and channeled them into this fic. That's it. That's the fic. Everything in this fic can be traced back to personal experience, except for a couple of the spider-themed superhero things.
> 
> Why is Tony dead in this fic? Because I deemed it appropriate.
> 
> I am on Tumblr as [beachtree](http://beachtree.tumblr.com).


End file.
